Saturday, February 2, 2013

"I never went to the Roxy or Danceteria, but I went to the British equivalent of those clubs," producer Trevor Jackson
has said, discussing his Playgroup project. Essentially, it's an
English kid's grown-up homage to his teenage fantasy of early-'80s New
York dance culture, a vision—filtered entirely through records and the
music press, but not inaccurate—of downtown Manhattan as a
polyrhythmically perverse utopia of sexual/racial border-crossing,
rootless cosmopolitanism, and all-night parties tinged with noir sleaze.

But unless you lived in London, like Trev did, or Manchester
(where the Hacienda was created in Paradise Garage's image), it was
hard back then for Britkids to get even a surrogate taste of the NYC
vibe. You could stay at home, crank your Mutant Discocompilation,
and dream on. Or you could start your own club night, like my mate
David. Named the Meltdown after an obscure NYC import 12-inch by Shirley Lites,
David's party was heralded by a Futurist manifesto that climaxed with
the rash promise: "The Meltdown will be greater and more beautiful than
sex." Among David's friends, the standing joke was that in reality it
was on par with a hand stroking your knee. On a typical night in 1983,
Meltdown's crowd consisted of his most loyal chums, a few goths, and two
businessmen standing as near to the door as possible and quaffing
furiously, this being the only place within 25 miles you could get a
drink after 11 p.m. Thinking he was being really cunning, David would
pump out tons of dry ice and wack on Sisters of Mercy's "Temple of Love"
to lure the goths onto the floor. Then, rather clumsily, he'd segue
into Vicky D's "This Beat Is Mine" or something by France Joli. As the
smoke cleared, you could see the goths hastily retreating to their booth
lair, like a flock of discophobic crows.

Playgroupflashes me back to those Meltdown nights—the pathos
and vainglory of trying to recreate Hurrah's in a gay disco on the
outskirts of Oxford.
(Come to think of it, David's great rivals for the student crowd
actually called themselves the Mudd Club.) This was a time when New York
and the U.K. were absurdly in sync, musically. In the CD booklet,
Jackson's list of inspirational producers is evenly divided between
Yanks and Limeys: Martin Rushent, Martin Hannett, Arthur Baker, Trevor Horn, Bill Laswell, Aldo Marin, and more. If he'd done one for labels, it'd include the doyens of punk-funk and post-disco: West End, 99, Prelude, Factory, Ze, Fetish, Celluloid, Cutting, Sleeping Bag . . .

Playgroup is one of those
floating-pool-of-participants-surrounding-a-producer deals. Strangely,
but somehow appropriately, nearly all of Jackson's collaborators and
sample-sources are Anglo aspirants rather than the genuine New York
article. So instead of, say, Joe Bowie from Defunkt, Ted Milton from Blurt contributes low-key horns; samples come from the Slits, ex-Josef K frontman Paul Haig, and the ultra-obscure Bristol post-punk outfit Shoes for Industry. "Too Much" is a sliver of filter-disco based on "Sex," an anemic funk effort from Scritti Politti's Songs to Remember. And Jackson's right-hand man is Edwyn Collins,
formerly of Orange Juice, the Scottish band who blended Chic and
Velvets into a winsome quasi-funk jangle. Collins provides glittering
chitters of Nile Rodgers-like rhythm guitar throughout, while his compatriot and contemporary Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera guests on "Number One," transporting you back to the days when disco records featured ungainly squawking guitar solos.

Jackson says he's trying to restore liveness to dance music: the
music's played in the studio, rather than looped or sequenced, and only a
handful of samples show up. He also wants to bring back songs with
intros, bridges, the whole package. Yet Playgroup is inevitably shaped
by '90s preoccupations with rhythm and timbre, informed by Jackson's
track record as a highly regarded remixer and hip-hop producer. This is
an album where the magic is all in the details: the exquisite interplay
of different drum sounds, the textural alternation of succulent and
crisp. The songs are merely serviceable. Indeed, there's a rather stark
contrast between Jackson's pro forma melodies and
get-this-party-started/get-it-on lyrics, and Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," which reggae toaster Shinehead
covers here as lover's rock. And the best original track is an
instrumental, "Surface to Air," which sounds like the Specials with
Scientist at the controls, the ghost-town atmosphere dubbed up and
rendered even more woozily lugubrious.

The fatal flaw with records based on homage is that they make you
want to dig out their inspirational sources. When I hear the juicy-fruit
synth-licks of "Pressure," I feel like I'd rather be riding D-Train,
eating a Peech, or Walking on Sunshine. Like the Strokes, Playgroup make you doubt your own pleasure.

Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveauis also based in early '80s currents of Trans-Atlantic fantasy and projection, but going the other direction: Released on an Ann Arbor
label, it's all about that urban Michigan/Illinois fascination for all
things Euro. As with other nu-wave/neo-electro, "disco nouveau" involves
going back to the stuff that originally inspired the inventors of house
and techno—Moroder, synthpop, Italo-disco—and imagining an alternate
historical path that could have developed: a parallel universe where
rave never happened and John Digweed
works in a bank. So the E gets taken out of house, and what's restored
is songs, playfulness, and charismatic vocalists (rather than the
depersonalized diva-as-raw-material approach in most modern dance).

As with Playgroup, though, it's not so easy to erase the advances and approaches of the last 15 years—for much of Tangent 2002, the artists's roots in techno are clearly visible. Revealingly, two of the best three tunes here are instrumentals: Daniel Wang's
mechanodisco ditty "Pistol Oderso" and Legowelt's impossibly stirring
and portentous "Disco Rout." The third killer tune, Solvent's "My
Radio," manages the overdone vocoder thing without sounding kitschy, by
pushing the effect to the brink of distortion, turning the vocal into a
gaseous swirl that accentuates the melody's mystic devotional feel. Of
the other vocal tracks, Adult's "Nite Life" delightfully blends perky
and stiff á la Human League's "Sound of the Crowd," while DMX Crew feat.
Tracy's "Make Me" has the bouncy-yet-listless charm of a young Bananarama.
But Perspects' sonorous male voice on "They Keep Dancing" is
unpleasantly redolent of Erasure, reminding you of just how much of the
'80s doesn't warrant excavation.

Tangent 2002 is the best electro-nuevo comp so far (with Tiga's American Gigolo mix
CD close behind). But it's less a preview of what's to come than a
handy catch-up for the last few years of '80s-revisionist electronica.
It still feels like there's some indefinable line that's yet to be
crossed before this genre transcends period pastiche and tackles the
challenge of somehow being more about now than then. Because if it is
still about then, the old records remain unbeatable.